Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Virtualization allows the abstraction of hardware resources and the pooling of these resources to support multiple virtual machines. For example, through virtualization, virtual machines with different operating systems may be run on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine is generally provisioned with virtual resources that provide similar functions as the physical hardware of a physical machine, such as central processing unit (CPU) resources, memory resources and network resources to run an operating system and applications.
In a virtualized computing environment, the utilization of virtual appliances represents a new way of deploying software applications. For developers and users, the benefits of virtual appliances include a reduction in development and distribution costs, accelerated time to market and the ability to leverage capabilities of different virtualization platforms. Although virtual appliances provide many benefits, in some scenarios, virtual appliances may not fully satisfy the requirements of the users, for example in a cost effective and efficient resource utilization manner.